These Times

From the archives: Whatcha gonna do?

Kirk Ericson | May 08, 20250

I’m taking three weeks off, mostly to grow out my fingernails. We’ll run reruns while I’m gone. This is the first column I wrote for the Shelton-Mason Country Journal. It was published Oct. 19, 2017.

Hello.

My wife, our 13-year-old son and I went to see Spook Handy last week at the Timberland library branch near our home. Spook is a folk singer who played with Pete Seeger, the musician and singing encyclopedia of American song who spent his life traveling this land of ours, singing tunes about its people and its landscape.

Pete played with Woody Guthrie, who also spent his life singing songs about us, including the American anthem “This Land is Your Land.”

Pete died in 2014, and now the disciples who played by Pete’s side are spread across this land sharing what they learned from the master.

Spook told many stories about Pete during his show, including one about being commissioned to write a song for a BBC documentary about people who believed the world was about to end. The documentary would also include the views of people who didn’t believe the world was about to end.

You had two sides. Us and them.

Spook said he prepared to write the song by reading the biblical book of Revelation and The New York Times.

But the song wouldn’t come. Spook said he couldn’t figure out what his point of view should be, what angle he should take to make the lyrics work. He told the crowd at the library that he didn’t think the world was going to end soon, but then he said, with a shrug, “Well, it could.”

Spook was in a bind, so he called Pete Seeger, which was a good number to have if you’re in Spook’s line of work.

Spook told Pete his dilemma, and Spook said Pete thought about five seconds before saying, “When you have two sides that don’t seem to have common ground, you have to look for the question in the middle. Find the right question.”

And the question for Spook became: “Whatcha gonna do?”

Sure, the world could end tomorrow or the world could exist tomorrow. But, what are you going to do today? What are you going to do today to make the world better? What are you going to do today to make the lives of people around you better?

Spook had his song.

I’ve worked for newspapers for more than half my life. I’ve worked on weekly newspapers in small towns and daily newspapers in big towns. And if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned how to ask questions — questions designed to find out what people really saw, what they really heard, what they really thought. I’ve learned how to ask questions designed to get truthful answers and to not ask questions designed to confirm what I already thought to be true.

Most newspaper people I’ve come across have learned the same skill.

The craft demands it.

I’ve also learned this: The peril of using labels. Democrat. Republican. Left wing. Right wing. Conservative. Liberal. Fascist. Socialist. Christian. Muslim. Atheist. Those are all words, and there are many more just like them, that many listeners stop at and then close their minds to what might follow.

They separate us.

They stop us from finding the question in the middle.